A smattering of hardware gadget resources:

• Think Geek
• SparkFun
• USB Gadgets
• Nexus
• Klear Gear
• Gadgetz4All

Widget platforms:

• Windows Gadgets
• Google Gadgets
• Yahoo Widgets
• Mac Dashboard
• FirefoxIt (though this may never come to fruition)
• Wikipedia widgets article

Mood Tap is a fantastic idea, and a very excellent FireFox addon. Unfortunately, the project, and especially the addon, seems to be long dead. Still, the extension taps into the site to render the mood of the world in the corner of your browser, and let you communicate your own mood back into the system. Nice!

Of course, best would be to see this on a little RGB-illuminated toy globe on your bookshelf.

An alternative approach to ambient information, Chumby will undoubtedly be very cool. I hope they do very well. I am certainly going to get one! They plan to be open, hackable, extensible. They are already starting a collection of widgets.

So the big problem for widget, gadget, browser platforms is the abstraction from the hardware. Of course, we want that, too, so the system can be cross-platform. But how do we get the gizmo data to and from the software?Probably the simplest way to do it is to write a driver which presents a TCP socket to the software platform. Firefox, widgets, gadgets, can all deal natively with TCP.

So if we use a USB serial device, such as FTDI’s FT232R, we would need to write a driver, installable on Linux, Mac and PC, which finds the virtual com port on those platforms, and channels it to a TCP socket. Then the remainder of the software could be platform-independent, Javascript even.

I’ve looked for this type of connector in the commercial software world, but no luck so far, at least not cross-platform. Here’s a nice set of tools for the Windows platform.